Month: July 2017

GETTING ACCLIMATED

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I wrote at the time:

It’s the third straight day of temperatures above ninety, with humidity to match. Still, we’ve avoided a miserable July this year, and the heat has not locked itself into the house: we’ve been able to cool everything overnight. What strikes me is that we’re no longer floored by the oppression. We simply move slower, more deliberately. Avoid using the oven. (We’ll grill outdoors this afternoon.)

In other words, we’ve adjusted ourselves to seasonal change.

Come winter, we’ll have to brace ourselves all over again for biting cold. What will be bitter in November or December will instead feel balmy come February or March.

At the office, I know that any sharp change in the weather brings an increase in obituaries. We can joke about the shift that sends those who are barely hanging on over the edge, but the numbers support us. People in climate-controlled chambers all the same responding to minor shifts in barometric temperature or dew points, all the same. Do we inhale and exhale something other than air?

Spaces I’ve entered where silent prayer or meditation are already under way all felt set apart from their surroundings. I’ve sometimes described it as diving into water and swimming beneath the surface or like entering a pressurized rare-book library.

Returning to the ashram and its grounds after being away presented a similar sensation, as have old Quaker meetinghouses, even years after their regular use.

Live within that energy, and you no longer notice it – it’s simply the way life is. Leave it, though, and you can feel you are falling through space, for weeks on end.

~*~

For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.

ON OUR OWN GROUND

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

each springtime and summer
we go our rounds, grubbing out

pervasive maple sprouts, glistening slugs
the evil elegance of bindweed

to open way
for what flowers or what bears would harvest

each repetition its own mixture
of success and disappointment

* * *

as my Lady of the Fabric Bins explains
the palette of the tongue

its savory and sweet
variations of wine tannin or bite

torches in our smoking garden twilight
with charcoal, glowing and ready

Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
For more, click here.

ALL OVER AGAIN. OUT OF NOWHERE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Why wait for the dust to settle? Here are 10 bullets from my end.

~*~

  1. A bit of gardening before Meeting for Worship. A round of picking raspberries, peas, string beans. Blueberries and currants are next to ripen.
  2. One foot in the present, the other in the past. Not just a pattern for dreams. It’s intrinsic to the process of writing. Add to that smells, sounds, touch, taste.
  3. I love the concept of the Commonplace Book – a kind of scrapbook of observations of a personal journey. It’s related to the tradition I discovered in whaling ship logs.
  4. The logbooks, by the way, had a specific form, which by 1840 came in printed versions with columns H, W, K – hour, wind, knots – plus course and comments like “lost sight of land” or notations of birds seen. Across the bottom of each page are other notes, such as latitude and longitude or the distance traveled in a day, where I saw up to 140 miles recorded. Turns out the entries also helped determine or justify extra rations for the crew and so on, depending on the conditions. Wonder how that format would work as a personal journal.
  5. What do we make of rounds of thunderstorms, interrupted by bursts of sunlight, knowing more weeds and garden slugs are on the way?
  6. The Portsmouth Greek Festival differs from ours in Dover. Their event has two food lines, rather than one, and an outdoor tent for dancing. It all takes place behind the church, rather than miles away. I’m surprised how little interaction there is between the two Orthodox congregations.
  7. Been meditating for 66 years now, one way or another upholding the spiritual discipline. More than half of that time has been as a member of Dover Friends, worshiping in our 1768 Quaker meetinghouse. Some of the members have been there the whole time with me. (How could that be? Already!)
  8. I’m not a big fan of comparative religion, looking for commonalities and similarities. I’m more interested in vital differences and nuance. How far this is from what I’d envisioned, back when I was largely agnostic.
  9. In a very fragile condition, a snake having just shed its skin.
  10. What was the biggest mistake in my life? (Or in yours?)

~*~

Doesn't everyone have a stone wall for the pots?
Doesn’t everyone have a stone wall for the pots?

ALONG THE SALMON FALLS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment
A view of Somersworth from the Salmon Falls River.
A view of Somersworth from the Salmon Falls River.

 

A dam atop the Great Falls connects Somersworth, New Hampshire, to Berwick, Maine. Last year's drought exposes both sides of the river.
A dam atop the Great Falls connects Somersworth, New Hampshire, to Berwick, Maine. Last year’s drought exposes both sides of the river.

The Salmon Falls, a river separating a section of Maine and New Hampshire, once powered mills along its way.

My fondness for old mills, by the way, did prompt a novel, Big Inca.

 

Gates for the Great Falls Manufacturing Co. controlled the flow of water to the mills in Somersworth.
Gates for the Great Falls Manufacturing Co. controlled the flow of water to the mills in Somersworth.

 

The mill run itself.
The mill run itself.

 

 

 

WEDDING PARTY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

“you said when you married
you’d still make love to other guys”

the guest at the house party argued
though now
I initially have difficulty telling whether

he’s talking to the bride or the groom
even as he added
“you’re too young to be getting married”

he spent the night anyway
among those of us encamped in sleeping bags
around that second-floor apartment

~*~

we’d had an intellectual tete-a-tete on the corner
and then, upstairs, stoned out and dancing
at the heart of the crowd, I collapsed

it was all ass and thigh from the floor

so she liked flirting with me . Ooooh!
she told me my eyes were a strange, beautiful color

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Copyright 2015

ANCIENT VIBRATIONS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Instead, I looked in another direction and discovered that the Yakama people once occupied 17,000 square miles and had three distinct language stocks. So, even back then one tongue was insufficient to articulate the vibrations of this place, even as an open desert. To try relating the qualities of a simple thing, a pane of hundred-year-old glass, perhaps; the interaction of clouds and sun, alkali and volcanic ash is far more complex. You start by learning the names of flora and fauna. Watch, listen, wait. I open a window and consider the current research, which places the first people here about 14,000 years before my arrival. These nomads made tools from bone and mineral. Hunted large and small game. Fished salmon. Collected river mussels. Gathered wild food plants. Given a guide and sufficient time, maybe I could learn to do these things. (Don’t look at me, Kokopelli shrugs. I’m not from around here.) Maybe I shouldn’t feel so strange about being here, either, even though such long perspective makes me feel incredibly insignificant. The Anglo civilization embodied here is only veneer concealing much deeper systems. The ancient climate was cooler and moister. The land was dotted by many lakes and small streams. Grasslands scattered with pine stands and willow flourished where there’s only sagebrush now. Food sources included bison, antelope, deer, foxes, muskrats, rabbits, ducks and geese (their eggs, too), and turtles.

I want to leap through time to join them, dressing the hides of their game, or making rattles and tools. These people used red and yellow pigments, and valued birds for their feathers as well as their flesh — cormorants, geese, condors, turkey vultures, and eagles all had clothing functions. Maybe I need some ceremonial garb. (Come, now! Kokopelli is hooting with laughter. He loves to taunt and mock me.) Tiny bone needles were used as far back as 10,000 years. I have enough trouble with steel needles today. So what do I make of their earliest burials, cremations that send the body back into spirit?

It’s obvious my own difficulties won’t end overnight.

This is a time of sparrows.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

PRELUDE & FUGUE 42/

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

ceramic dragon as a weed patch with teeth

you, me, it

don’t forget the oyster crackers

*   *   *

the repose of an attic ceramic dragon
papered in autumn foliage of a white T-shirt
and four blue candles caps a corner mattress
with weeds and a sequoia the attic room reposes
in a white T-shirt, a blue cap feeds on a corner mattress
the tile dragon ignites four candles with weeds
a sequoia papers autumn foliage over the reposing feed
that rooms in a white T-shirt and blue feed cap

a repairman walks past a weed patch
with teeth in white shorts

climbing a gray windmill two people
walk past as weeds with teeth patch

white shorts on two people climbing
a gray windmill repairman walks past

two people in white shorts and gray
windmill teeth climb a weed patch

in a corner in a weed mattress and sequoia
four candles won’t forget the oyster crackers
nor tile ceramic dragon papered in autumn foliage
all the repose of an attic room of four candles fed
a white T-shirt and blue feed cap a mattress
corners a tile ceramic dragon with weeds
and a sequoia papered in autumn foliage feed
don’t forget the oyster crackers atop four candles

~*~

Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see all 50 Preludes & Fugues, click here.

RUNNING INTO YOUR YOUNGER SELF AS A STRANGER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I revisit the abandoned plans for two early novels, what I encounter feels strange and wondrous – and sometimes sophomoric. Yes, I wrote what appears here, but these days the words could be by a stranger – a youngster I wouldn’t mind meeting. In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential campaign, what had seemed outrageous in my “political science fiction” draft four decades earlier now has an air of prophecy. The other work, a detective novel, revives memories of a potential collaborator no longer among the living. Put together with a little bit more, they create a new book of fiction, one that runs Along the Parallel Tracks of Yin and Yang. As we might say in Zen, these works are what they are. Or what you, too, bring to the story. Enjoy the ride.

~*~

For these stories and more, visit Thistle/Flinch editions.

AS TRULY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

the reality of who we are
becomes too unbearable
to sustain

the animal, adorned
over shame

crawl away, then

in whose image
of Creation
are we naked?

O Holy One
casting light within
the diverse exhaustion
yet exposes
and heals

Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see the full set, click here.

AS I WROTE TO ISAIAH’S MOTHER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

That summer, I read his namesake book again, this time in the New Jerusalem Version, a fresh, scholarly translation that sticks very close to the text—in the process losing poetry while gaining directness. I’ve joked that this version sounds more like a batch of reports from a Quaker meeting’s Peace & Social Concerns Committee than a section from the Bible. Been surprised, too, how early in the text the hopeful, Messianic thread appears to weave through the warnings of doom and gloom; all along, I had thought the first half of the book was dominated by dark jeremiads, with the lightness taking the lead in the second half. Not so!

~*~

For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.